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Keeping Motivated
The most important aspect of maintaining a healthy diet isn’t the type of diet you choose, but whether or not you can stick to it. Whether you go low calorie, low carb, low fat or high fiber, you need to be able to eat that way for a long time to keep the extra weight off and enjoy any real health benefits. Everyone who follows a diet has times when it is tough to stay motivated and that is when it is just too easy to give up.

In order to maintain a healthy diet, it helps to have a plan so that you know what to do when the initial excitement and motivation of a new diet wears thin. Here are some tips for maintaining a healthy diet:

Choose the Best Diet For You
The first thing you need to do is choose the diet that is easiest for you to follow.

How do you choose the best diet? All diets require you to monitor your consumption of something. You need to count calories, carbs, fats, fiber or something. Which one is the easiest? That is really up to you.

You may also feel physically better following one diet over the others. Feeling healthy will help keep your willpower strong when you are faced with a dietary dilemma. If you really don’t know which diet you would like best, you can always give a diet a two-week test drive. This way you can see how you feel and find out how easy the diet is to understand and follow. Remember to choose healthy foods, no matter which diet you choose.

Set Realistic Goals
Put some thought into why you are going on a diet. Are you trying to lose weight? Do you need to reduce your risk factors for chronic disease? Do you want to look good in a swimsuit? Maybe you had a heart attack and you want to do everything you can to see your grandchildren grow up.

Your goals are important to you, yet to be successful, you need to be realistic about how to set those goals. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to make huge changes over night. If it took you ten years to gain 50 pounds, don’t pretend that you can lose 50 pounds in three months. You can, however lose five to 15 pounds in three months. Think along similar lines for changing from junk food to healthy food. If you eat a big bowl of ice cream and chocolate syrup every night after dinner, it might be tough to give that up completely and forever. Start with replacing that bowl of ice cream with a bowl of fresh berries two or three times per week. Keep your goals reasonable and you can have the fun of reaching them quickly and setting new ones.

Choose the Right Tools
Very few people can follow a healthy diet without keeping track of the foods they eat. Just like you need to keep track of your bills and the money in your bank account, you need to keep track of the calories, carb grams, fat grams, or fiber grams that you take in each day. In order to keep track of the foods you eat, you need to write them all down in a food diary or join an online service like Calorie-count.com. Keeping track of your diet will help keep you motivated and give you a realistic idea of how much healthy food verses how much unhealthy food you are eating.

Find a Friend or Join a Community
Sometimes it seems like everyone else around you is eating what they want and tempting you to go off your diet too. Dieting can be tough when you do it alone. Find someone to go on a diet with you. Having a spouse, family member, co-worker or friend who has similar dietary goals will help keep you both on track.

Keep Reminders
It is good to give yourself a little nudge now and then. Remember those reasons you have for going on a healthy diet? Write those reasons down on a small note card and tuck that card into your purse or wallet. You may not see it every day, but you will find it often enough to remind you about why you are watching your diet. Another option is to find a weight loss quote you like and use it as a screen-saver on your computer.

Make Your Bad-Mood-Foods Healthier
Sometimes your mood can have a major impact on your diet. Think of comfort food. What do you eat when you are having a bad day? A banana split? Big greasy burger and fries? A pile of fried chicken? All of these are real diet-breakers because the calories can pile up fast while you are feeding your bad mood. Find some new comfort foods. Make sure they are high in fiber and you will fill up before you eat too many calories. Did you love PB and Js as a kid? Make a healthier PB and J with whole grain bread. Instead of that banana split, how about banana chunks, strawberries and blueberries with whipped topping and nuts. It is just as sweet, but much better for you. Still want that fried chicken? How about just one piece after you eat a healthy salad.

Be Good to Yourself
We all slip up now and then. That’s OK. If you fall off the healthy foods wagon, don’t beat yourself up over it. Tell yourself you will do a better job with your next meal and when that next meal rolls around, choose something healthy like baked chicken or fish with lots of green vegetables. Congratulate yourself for eating a healthy meal again and know that you will do it again at the next meal.

Get Some Exercise
Physical activity will help you watch your weight, give you strong muscles and keep your heart healthy. Aerobic and resistive exercises will also boost your mood, decrease your appetite and help keep you motivated to eat right.

It’s an age-old question, with no right answers. If you have to do both in the same day, does it matter whether you do strength training or cardio first?

I think that the ideal would be to do these two forms of exercise on different days (or one in the morning and one in the evening), so that you can devote maximum effort and get the maximum benefit from each. Any time you do one followed by the other, the second one will suffer at least a little (although you may gradually improve your overall endurance this way).

If that’s not possible, then it comes down to a question of priorities and goals–for that day, and overall. If you’re trying to build muscle mass, doing cardio right after strength training is not usually a good idea, because the more depleted your muscle fuel (glycogen) becomes, the more protein you’re body will use as fuel. After an hour of fairly intense exercise, protein may provide up to 10% of the fuel used, compared to the 1-2% it normally provides. That’s the opposite of what you want for muscle building. To increase strength, you want your body to shift into “repair and rebuild” (anabolic) mode as soon as possible after your strength workout, and the best way to make that happen is to eat instead of doing cardio. A light cardio workout before lifting would be better. But don’t try to do a strenuous strength workout after you’ve already tired yourself out with cardio–that’s not safe.

if you’re mainly trying to lose fat and maintain the muscle you’ve got, then doing cardio after strength training can be a good strategy. The percentage of energy contributed by fat goes up considerably after an hour of exercise, and since strength training uses mostly glucose for energy, doing that first will also increase the amount of fat your body uses for the cardio. However, it’s also true that as more fat is being used to fuel the exercise, the less work you’ll be able to put out, and the fewer total calories you’ll burn. Your cardio will probably be less intense and/or shorter than it would
otherwise be, and this may cancel out the amount of extra fat actually burned.

You’ll find a lot of different opinions when it comes to this question. I don’t know that there is a lot of reliable research to substantiate doing one or the other first, so I think it comes down to individual goals and preference. If your goal is to build muscle mass and strength, you’d probably want to do your weight training first. If your goal is to gain cardiovascular endurance, you’d want to do your cardio workout first. Here’s an example. When I train for a marathon, my primary focus is increasing my mileage. Weight training is going to help prevent injury and increase strength, but what matters most is the running and increasing my distance. So in that case, I always do cardio first.

When it comes to weight loss, I recommend doing cardio first. Cardio exercise is going to help you burn the most calories in the shortest period of time. Although weight training is also going to help with weight loss (and should be part of any workout routine), I would make cardio the activity you’re going to do while you have the most energy and your muscles are rested. No matter which order you choose, the second activity is going to suffer (to a certain extent) because you’ve already used up some of your energy. If you can do your cardio and strength training on different days, that would be the ideal situation. But no matter which order you use, you’ll want to do a good 5-10 minute warm up before each workout session.

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